When the church is committed to integral mission and to communicating the gospel through everything it is, does, and says, it understands that its goal is not to become large numerically, nor to be rich materially, nor powerful politically. Its purpose is to incarnate the values of the Kingdom of God and to witness to the love and the justice revealed in Jesus Christ, by the power of the Spirit, for the transformation of human life in all its dimensions, both on the individual level and on the community level.

MISSION... is focused on crossing the frontier between faith and no faith, not only in geographical terms, but in cultural, ethnic, social, economical and political terms, for the purpose of transforming life in all its dimensions, according to God’s plan, so that all people and human communities may experience the abundant life that Christ offers them.

We become ‘wholistic’ in the fullest biblical sense when we understand that God has called and commissioned the local church as His instrument for the transformation of all things created. The church is called to be a community with a mission, and that mission is to proclaim the good news of hope to all of creation (Co 1:23). The mission is wholistic because it depends on the mission of God, which included all of creation and human life. God, who became incarnate through his son Jesus Christ and who continues to work throughout history through his Holy Spirit, is calling us to collaborate with him to fulfill his purposes in this world. Christ died not only to redeem us from all iniquity, but also to reunite and purify for himself a people enthusiastic for good works (Titus 2:14). He died to transform individuals and the political, economic, and cultural contexts in which they live, so that the whole social context opens itself to the redemptive power of Christ.

The church is God’s instrument to carry out wholistic mission for theological as well as practical reasons. On the one hand, the church as the people of God, body of Christ and community of the Holy Spirit, has been made by God to incarnate the purpose of God to restore the human race (James 1:8). On the other hand, the local church is inserted into a specific social context, and so, it has the ability to know more than any other entity the concrete necessities of the people that live in that context. Furthermore, the church has the human resources (and sometimes even the material resources) to respond to the necessities and manifest the love of God in word and deed. Consequently, the church is above and beyond any other entity in its capacity to take advantage of the network of human relations in its wholistic mission. Biblically, the agent of wholistic mission is not a para-church organization, but a community empowered by the Spirit of God” (Rene Padilla, Mission Magazine Editorial #62).